CROSSED PORTRAITS
- Imanos Santos
- Jan 9
- 4 min read
CROSSED PORTRAITS
Xavier Dolan & Pedro Almodóvar
The Intimate in Technicolor
By Imanos Santos
Feverish, baroque, sincere—three words to trace the outline of two filmmakers who refuse the lukewarm comfort of their time.
They are feverish because they shoot on the edge of rupture, in that fragile zone where emotion threatens to flood everything. Their cameras feel like instruments of survival: Dolan films as one confesses, breath short, nerves exposed; Almodóvar composes like a chromatic corrida, each gesture calibrated, each color charged.
They are baroque because they have never feared excess. Their worlds do not apologize for being too bright, too talkative, too full. For Almodóvar, baroque is resistance—lipstick as a banner, décor as cathedral. For Dolan, it becomes inner vertigo: lightning edits, faces filmed too close, a cry cut short. For both, intensity is a way toward truth, because truth, in their cinema, is never sober.
And they are sincere, even to the point of nakedness. Nothing hides behind theory or demonstration; their films feel like admissions. They expose wounded, luminous beings, driven by a faith in art as the last possible language. Their sincerity is not purity—it is courage: showing oneself without armor, offering beauty the way one offers a scar.
Between Dolan and Almodóvar there is a kinship of spirit more than of style: a love of excess, pain, mothers, and impossible love. They refuse the world’s greys in favor of vivid reds, electric blues, and flashes of life that burn through the screen. They do not simply depict reality—they transfigure it. Their films do not describe; they confess.
Their contexts differ. Almodóvar rises from a Spain where passion was long veiled by Catholicism and dictatorship; Dolan comes of age in a calmer Québec, where norms weigh differently—through gender, lineage, expectation. One gives voice to wounds that were forced into silence; the other speaks for those still struggling to be heard. Both film love, but a love threaded with anger, forgiveness, and desire—fire that devours without ever fully consuming.
For Almodóvar, cinema becomes the theatre of the world: women on the brink, celestial outsiders, priests at the edge, secrets buried under layers of makeup and lies. Pain becomes spectacle—yet every color is a cry. His excess is lucid, almost moral: it saves.
For Dolan, cinema is a raw self-portrait, filmed in mirrors and open wounds. Mommy or Laurence Anyways are less stories than exposed nerves where beauty rises to the surface. He captures the overflow of the inner life: the omnipresent mother, the impossible love, the adolescent scream. He films the silence between insults, the breath caught by feeling, the face too close—hysteria turned inward until crisis becomes whisper.
Almodóvar grew up with cinema as catharsis; Dolan uses it as therapy. The Spaniard invents a flamboyant family of women—his personal mythology. The Québécois dissects his own, breaks it, rebuilds it—his intimate mythology. Yet both remain prodigal sons. Almodóvar keeps speaking to his mother, even beyond her absence; Dolan films his with near-obsession, as if cinema might understand her better than he can. The maternal bond is the spine of their work: in Pedro, the mother consoles and forgives; in Xavier, she loves and suffocates. In both, love reaches excess—until it becomes tragedy.
Their methods reveal what separates them. Almodóvar, the perfectionist, composes each frame like a painting—order wrested from chaos. Dolan works in flashes: he burns, cuts, starts again. One is a painter of emotions; the other a sculptor of disorder. Almodóvar places the camera to build myth; Dolan to seize a fleeting truth. Each, in his own way, lies with sincerity.
Behind Almodóvar’s flamboyance lives a certain modesty—his wounds hidden in women’s stories. Behind Dolan’s confessions stands a legend in the making—his wounds turned into icons. Both are enfant terribles who reject tepidness, choosing the tragic over the banal.
An invisible thread binds them: pure emotion. In Almodóvar, beauty saves; in Dolan, it both breaks and mends. They believe in cinema as a kind of sacrament—profane masses where life is celebrated despite everything, and love is honored even when it hurts.
People say Almodóvar films women and Dolan films mothers. In truth, they film the same thing: vulnerability, in every form. Pedro expresses it through the social body; Xavier through the psyche. Their characters carry too much feeling, too much memory, too much color for a world that has grown pale.
When Pain and Glory meets Matthias & Maxime, two mirrors answer each other across time: an aging artist facing his past; a young man unable to build a future. Two men confronting the vertigo of being seen—by the public, by the mother, by oneself.
At heart, their cinema tells one story: the human being who refuses to stay silent. In Dolan, emotion overflows like a flood; in Almodóvar, it rises like a prayer in color. Different palettes, same light: absolute sincerity.
Almodóvar has found peace in artifice; Dolan is still searching through pain. In that tension lies their genius: they remind us that the intimate— even filmed in technicolor—remains the most universal territory.
Their films invite us to cry, to laugh, to recognize ourselves in characters too beautiful to be real, too human to be false. Because in the end—whether it is the mother of All About My Mother or the mother of Mommy—the prayer is the same: to love, despite loss, despite oneself, despite everything.
One from Madrid, the other from Montréal, they converge in a single cry of truth: cinema is not here to explain—it is here to make us feel. For them, the intimate is not a boundary. It is a universe.
